Get it for me!

Over the last few days, I’ve been Internetting professionally pretty much exclusively.  Wha?  Swear.  So, I haven’t been lovin’ the Internet much.  In fact, I would say it would have been a stretch to express my sentiments towards It with any real warmth.  There’s been a cooling.

But today I experienced one of my favorite Internet interactions: I told it to get me something I didn’t even know the name of, and it complied.  Utterly!

For there is a centuries old form of Catalan dance that I stumbled across whilst in the small village of Begur, in Catalunya, España.  My party went to dinner one night and when we emerged into the town square, rings of people were everywhere, hopping in dainty and ever-increasing-in-speed steps.  A band was assembled on a small stage in front of The Church.  It was delightful, mysterious, ancient-seeming and new.  And really fun to watch.

Well this was a couple of weeks ago.  Yesterday I was showing a friend a photo of this dance from my trip but couldn’t remember its name.  But lo and behold “dance+catalan” was really all it took to get me started.  Behold, the Sardana!

Begur Saturday Night Fever

Even better than spitting out dance facts, the Internet will show you the Sardana.  Can you imagine?  El Internet will show you people doing a dance that probably was created in the 1600s. Don’t imagine: click it.

If I may quote from wikipedia for the fun, “There is a pattern of tirades danced, which may be curts, curts, llargs, llargs, curts, curts, llargs, llargs; a two-measure break called contrapunt; llargs; contrapunt; llargs.”

LLARG!  That sounds hard.

And for your information, Curt LLarg is not your local Supervisor, but simply Catalan: ‘curt’ = ‘short’ and ‘llarg’ = ‘long.’

More Sardana action after the dainty hop.

Holy crap–my mind has been blown!

Ok, so after my 24-sided-die-purple man post, I was really tempted to write an Ode to Craig Newmark, creator of utterly essential and now hella international craigslist.org as well as the helpful Craigslist Foundation.  This is the man that could have sold out but didn’t.  Could have ruined a perfectly simple site design but didn’t.  Could have blocked an interesting movie from getting made, but didn’t.

As for the site?  I think Internet Lovers agree, Craigslist’s ‘best of’ section continually delivers the Internet goods.  For inst, if you have not LOL’d at your desk at the ‘Poop on there’ post (Oh, here, you poor dumb bastard) you either don’t have a desk, don’t have a computer, or have no friends to send it to you.  Or you’re that guy.  In which case, way to take one for the team!  Good job, buddy.  But I digress: Craigslist is awesome, and beyond that, necessary.  Jobs, concert tickets, hook-ups with the lonely, gender diverse and married–craigslist has it all.  If you’re bored and alone on a Saturday night, you can read romantic ‘Missed Connections,’ or look at penis pics under ‘Casual Encounters.’  Actually, why choose?

Certainly its creator is worthy of High Tech Industry Internet Praise!  And he has had it, aplenty.

The man behind the list.

As Craig is my neighbor, however, the ode I wanted to write was more personal in nature:  when you walked by our garage sale the other day?  And my friend told you we couldn’t sell our stuff on your site?  Thanks for not being a dick about it.  We did pretty well on the street though.

All this was twinkling through my head when I went to edit my Homo Meter post only to see that Craig is on their homepage!!!  WHA????

Mind.  Totally.  Blown.  I was actually so dazzled by the gay header image that I couldn’t even look further down the page.  Does his face endorse this as a real product, then?  Should I go buy one, stat?  Internet: I think I need a time-out.  It’s been a full day, and we’ve come full circle.

Like a mischevious genie, I leave you with these wishes:

1.  Wish you had a reason to move to Pittsburgh?

2.  Wish you had a gift for purple man, from the alt.universe wherein you meet him for a date?  Try this.

3.  Wish you could see Craig in a beret? Robert Holmgren is a helluva photog!

The internet is AWESOME!

The internet is AWESOME!, originally uploaded by jasonshellen.

Blurry but true.